Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

At dawn, she awoke weary — couldn’t sleep in as she had in younger years — and stayed under the covers, floating around Caergenog till the present gained focus. She glimpsed the wine bottle on the counter, not half drunk as intended but nearly empty. She had barely noticed the third and fourth glasses of the evening before. Tooly resolved to skip her nightcap that evening, and bought nothing on the way home. Then bedtime came again, and unease with it, leading her upstairs for a nip of something. She stood in the dark house, looking out the front window, full glass in hand.

Sipping before one of the McGrorys’ laptops, she resumed her late-night hobby of peeping at the lives of those she’d known. Running through names from the past, she typed in “Jon Priddles”—still at King Chulalongkorn International School, it turned out: chairman of the board of trustees now, after “a beloved career as principal,” according to the school website. She found information on Gilbert Lerallu, too, the owner of that pig at 115th Street, now critically acclaimed (the man, not the pig) for an album of avant-garde harpsichord compositions. When she typed in Xavi’s full name, “Xavier Karamage,” nothing relevant came up.

Of those she’d known in New York, he’d seemed the most likely to flourish: smart, ambitious, charming. There was no trace of him. She had tried to ask Duncan, but whenever she mentioned those days he cut the conversation short. She never pressed the matter. So many aspects of that period troubled her, particularly how she’d behaved.

“SLEEP WELL?” she asked Humphrey, unloading a few ready-to-heat meals from shopping bags. Her attempts to pull him from torpor, to get him eating properly, reading again, to rouse his intellect — all this had fizzled.

The former Humphrey grew harder to retrieve. Insidiously, the present Humphrey snuffed out the previous one, which came to seem implausible. People manifested so many selves over a lifetime. Was only the latest valid?

“Let me open the curtains — gorgeous sun today.”

He frowned at the white-and-black object she held. “What’s that?”

She handed over her newspaper, and he pressed the front page to his nose, then extended it, struggling for focus. She fetched his glasses and perched herself on the arm of his chair.

“Who’s this?” he asked, tapping the photo of a disgraced New York politician who had injudiciously distributed photos of his crotch. It was a bad summer for powerful men, she informed Humphrey, with the humiliation of Anthony Weiner, the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the humbling of Rupert Murdoch, the ousting of Arab dictators.

He pointed at another photo. “She looks strange.”

“That’s a man.”

They worked through the newspaper, not by the words but by the faces, making a game of guessing each expression. Abruptly, Humphrey stood, the paper falling off his lap and coming apart at his feet. “Look at the clouds,” he said, tottering toward the window. He shuffled back to his armchair, sat heavily, interlaced his fingers across his chest.

“What are you thinking, Humph?”

At length, he responded. “I don’t know what’s happening in the world.”

“I’ll leave the paper here for you. You can go through it after I’ve gone.”

The next day, that copy sat untouched. She had the latest edition with her. “I read this amazing article, Humph, about how thirty-five hours of new footage get uploaded to this website called YouTube every minute. Incredible, no?” But how absurd to speak of tech marvels to a man who’d never left the previous century. She attempted to explain: electronic pulses hurtled around the world, sending information, photographs, video everywhere. “Sorry, I’m explaining it badly. I’ll show you sometime.”

He grunted at her description of the present. “I feel apprehensive,” he said. “What am I supposed to be worrying about?”

“About nothing. I’m taking care of things.”

He looked away, unconvinced. “Can’t find what I want.”

“Well, you have a lot to remember, Humph. Your life has been going on since the 1920s.”

“How old would you say I am?”

“You’re eighty-three.”

“Am I?” he replied, astounded. “That’s almost indecent!”

“But you feel like you’re only six.”

“Seven,” he corrected her.

“You felt six the other day.”

“I’m more grown-up than a six-year-old.”

She kissed his cheek.

“Gosh, I don’t know you that well,” he joked. “Can I make you a coffee?”

“Let me,” she said, and leaped to her feet, elated at this glimpse of the old Humphrey. There were times when it was him again, burning through thick clouds.

“Tricky spelling your name,” he remarked, when she returned from the communal kitchen. “How would you do that?”

“What, spell it?”

“Yes, all right.” He took the mug, drizzling coffee down his trouser leg.

She gave her name letter by letter. “And you remember my nickname: Tooly.”

“Well, I’m not going to argue over it. How long are you staying?”

A horrible realization struck her: he didn’t recognize her. “I was thinking of when I was a little girl, and I met you,” she said. “You explained chess, and you let me cheat. You were very sweet to me.”

“Nonsense!”

“You were,” she insisted. “I was there.”

Within an hour, Tooly stood at the window of a motel room on Emmons Avenue, overlooking the parking lot. On the bed behind her, Garry smoked. Every few days, they rented a room for four hours, which was affordable if they split the cost. The place made for a sordid rendezvous, wallpaper peeling, mattress covered with plastic, porn on Channel 33. Yet the awfulness amused them, and they competed to find the most repellent feature. Today, the winning entry had been dead cockroaches in the shower stall.

Garry had a handsome face, eyes narrowing to slits when he laughed. He patted her bare stomach; a dull smack. “You are too thin.”

To disprove this, she pinched a bit of fat, then gathered her underwear to cover her nakedness. She took a drag of his cigarette for the intimacy, the damp filter, and listened to his young-man chatter about the inevitability of his own success, described with knee-jiggling zeal. He had grown up in Novosibirsk, dreaming of a million bucks. “Today, I realize one million buys nothing.”

They spoke as if conducting different conversations, she the older woman, he the younger man, both conscious of the gulf, which had such different meanings for each. Afterward, they sat in his banged-up Pontiac in the parking lot, and he unpacked a picnic, food taken from home, supposedly to keep him going while he studied at community college.

“Doesn’t your mother notice when so much stuff goes missing?”

He chewed with his mouth open. “She thinks I have a big appetite.” In passing, he mentioned an upcoming vacation in Russia with his fiancée.

“Oh,” Tooly responded. “Didn’t know you had one.”

“I planned this trip for ages.”

“I mean,” she specified, “didn’t know you had a fiancée.”

From a fling like this, Tooly expected only human contact and distraction. Both could be found elsewhere. “Let’s leave it at this,” she said, when he dropped her at the Sheepshead Bay station. She always felt a little relieved at an excuse to break up — one less thing to carry around.

Tooly returned that night to find the McGrory siblings at war, videogames bleeping in the TV room, their mother chewing her fingernail in the glow of an iPad 2—“Hey, you,” Bridget said, “come hang out”—and since Tooly was a guest she had to, though what she needed was the opposite of their eyes. Then hers opened and it was time to rise and begin again, Mac staring at her, awaiting his drive to another unhappy day.